Tag Archives: feldenkrais

Alright, enough of the political commentary! At least for now. Would you be willing to engage with me a little bit here and tell me:

“Have you thought about where you want to go with the work of Moshe Feldenkrais?

That is, what you want to create for yourself, for your friends or *insert your words here.* I would really like to know and so would your friends and colleagues. Take a moment and leave a response below or send me an email via the contact form at the bottom of the page?

There will be a time when I will no longer post updates on this blog. Consider subscribing to my new one and then unsubscribing to this one. If you do not, that is fine. But you will eventually miss out on the new stuff I am putting out there.

This blog post went out a little late and many of you missed the free webinar. I am really sorry about that. The fault was mine. Next time, I will do a better job. And by the way – do not forget that there is still great new content on RyanNagy.com. Forgive me for doing so, but I have started a new series called, “Things Feldenkrais was Wrong About. I started rather tamely with something that matters to me as a student of Milton Erickson’s work: http://www.ryannagy.com/2014/things-feldenkrais-was-wrong-about-part-1/

As a Feldenkrais practitioner, student or fan you have heard – I hope – about Moshe’s desire to have his students learn to live in the unknown. As he wrote quite simply in The Elusive Obvious,

“…learning to us is learning to grasp the unknown”

Living in the unknown is very often about learning to take intelligent risks on our own behalf, and managing the anxiety of risk taking and it’s consequences. As those of you with children already know, their is a group of people KNOWN for their risk taking: Teenagers. Tonight, one of my friends and colleagues, Dr. Ruth Buczynski will be interviewing Dan Siegel, MD about risk-taking in general and teenagers in specific. I think you will find this to be quite an illuminating discussion for your life and practice.

The webinar is free if you enroll now. Or if you would like to have a 6-webinars from this series on “Brain Science” you can get all of the webinars in the series, including video downloads, audio downloads, and transcripts by signing up for a Gold Membership

I have been in the process of reviewing some of the written transcripts from Dr. Feldenkrais’s various trainings and articles for a new project that I am pulling together. I have to admit, there are so many gems in Feldenkrais’ talks that it gets a little overwhelming at times.

One idea that he tries to convey in so many ways is the importance of variability of experience in learning new responses. For example,

“..another important feature of the group work is the continued novelty of situation that is maintained throughout the course. Once the novelty wears off, awareness is dulled and no learning takes place.” Mind and Body (1964) Moshe Feldenkrais.

As I wrote over on RyanNagy.com what Feldenkrais wrote is “obvious” to us now. But when he wrote it in 1964, is sure as hell was not.

“…when Moshe died in 1984, there was little, perhaps no, published research that showed that the brain of an adult could change. In fact, when I first returned to college in the mid 1990’s most scientists STILL believed the mature brain could not grow new brain cells nor regenerate connections and damaged functions. Incredible, isn’t it? They believed that the brain had to remain relatively fixed or stable in order to maintain long-term memories and skills. It is an vastly different world that we live in today. We can now have conversations about neurogenesis and brain change without seeming like lunatics.”

We, as practitioners already knew that the brain and nervous system can and do change through specific novel experiences. We knew as Feldenkrais practitioners and as people and now society and the scientific community is learning.

The larger question for me is how to keep up on what is known and has been published and how to use it to promote Feldenkrais for the betterment of society and ourselves. Tonight and perhaps tommorrow morning as well, I will be watching a free 60-minute webinar by Dr. Rick Hanson. Two parts of his talk have caught my eye:

The Importance of Novelty for Neuroplasticity: Why New Experiences Have Such a Transformative Effect on the Brain

The 5 Factors that Help Learning Take Hold and How They Promote Neuroplasticity

I think there will be some nuggets in this talk that will make me a better person and practitioner. If you are interested you can sign-up to get the webinar for free or pay to get downloadable copies as video, audio and written transcripts. Find and click the grey box that reads “Free Of Charge.” :Dr. Steve Hanson with NICABM.

I thought this was kind of cool. A scan of one of the original flyers from the Feldenkrais training at Amherst. Originally posted by Elinor Silverstein on Facebook. You can click the image above to open in another window and then download. Full text of the flyer and a little commentary is available on my main website: The Amherst Training Flyer.

Update, Thursday, May 9th: The free series is done. However all the sessions are available as video and audio with transcripts for a small price. But the price is going up on May 13th, so enroll now if you want the content. These webinars helped me understand why some people get more benefit from Feldenkrais sessions and some people (such as myself) get LESS benefit. Many of us have trauma symptoms, dissociation and neurological “blocks” that limit what we can gain from the Feldenkrais Method. These webinars with Peter Levine, Pat Ogden and Stephen Porges have given me tools for dealing with these traumatic after effects, “healing” them and helping a person stay in the present moment and in the lesson.

Update: The webinar is starting in just a few hours, today, Weds, March 8. It will be broadcast at two times: 5pm EDT (Eastern Daylight Time) and 6:30pm EDT. But you must register to attend free: Register for Pat Ogden Webinar on Trauma.

***If you missed the webinar or would like to download it or have trancscripts, there is also a paid option on the same page. cheers! Ryan

….I am in the midst of preparing myself for an online webinar that is coming up very soon on Trauma and The Body. The next speaker is Pat Ogden, PhD who is not only a psychologist but has also studied Hakomi and the Alexander Technique. She also makes a point to mention Feldenkrais in her various books and papers. I do not always share the details of these webinars. I only share the ones that I have a deep interest in or that I think other Feldenkrais practitioners will enjoy. This one looks to be great for Feldenkrais people.

The Ogden webinar, part of a larger series on trauma, is interesting as her language and strategies, to me, are very “Feldenkrais friendly” and often mirror the experiential, process-based, and action-based means of the work of Moshe Feldenkrais. For example, this quotation that I took from one of her research papers:

“The role of the therapist is to facilitate self-awareness and self-regulation, rather than to witness and interpret the trauma. [It] involves working with sensations and action tendencies in order to discover new ways of orienting and moving through the world.”

Does that evoke familiar ideas for you? She focuses not on judgement and “insight” but getting people to take action in the world. And later in the same article:

“In the act of noticing their bodily experience, innate somatic regulatory capacities, or “resources,” become spontaneously available or can be evoked by the therapist: resources such as taking a breath, adjusting the spine, making a movement, orienting, perceptually and physically to the environment.”

Pretty cool! There is much more that I could say about this webinar, but I am relatively new to Dr. Ogden’s work and should perhaps leave it to her to describe what she does. The webinar is free if you register ahead of time and attend “live.” You can also pay if you would rather download the video (and audio version) and get transcripts and such. I wonder a great deal how many people come to the Feldenkrais Method (consciously or otherwise) because they are dealing with unresolved trauma. And I wonder yet again, if the Method can give them relief. I think the answer for many is “no.” There are some specific strategies and ideas missing in the Method. Strategies and ideas which, though similar, are different in their implementation and use. This is a topic I will return to in a later blog post on RyanNagy.com. In the meantime, to hear Dr. Ogden’s talk please click the link below and find the line and grey box on the page that reads: Register here for the Wednesday broadcasts only. Free of Charge. Feel free to forward this blog post or post on social media if you know of others who will benefit. I do get an affiliate fee for each paid registration.

cheers!

Ryan

I apologize in advance for any spelling or grammar errors. I did this quickly Sunday morning, before taking the rest of the day off.

I am nearly done blogging here on UtahFeldenkrais.org. I am slowly but surely moving my writing to the blog on RyanNagy.com. I have to say that it is a rather embodying experience to bring all my various interests under “one roof.” For years, RyanNagy.com was primarily a blog about search engine optimization and search marketing. The website was a tool that I used successfully to build a practice in that field. I had several clients who were start-ups and also several who were larger, multi-million dollar businesses. Fun stuff for a while. But I got bored. I now only work on my own projects and of those with whom I collaborate. And I no longer live in Utah! So, time to leave “utah feldenkrais” and bring it all home to Ryan Nagy.

I still have a few more posts here on UtahFeldenkrais.org and I have much work to do on the other site before it is completely ready.

Join me over there if you choose. When I finally stop blogging here, I will send you a notification. And for those of you who only want to read about certain topics (such as Feldenkrais) and not others (Marketing, Technoology, Hypnosis etc), I will have the option of deciding which types of notifications you receive.

I have been discussing a project with a friend of mine. He is a lawyer and a published author and I want him to research and write something for me about the work of Moshe Feldenkrais. The topic is something that I would personally like to write about, but doing so would take away from other writing projects that I am working on. The article will also require some legal knowledge that I do not have. If the project comes together, I will pay my friend to write the article. And I will publish the article on one of my websites or perhaps as an eBook sold on my website, Amazon and iTunes.

The process of implementing my own writing project made me wonder if it would be useful, in general, to support people writing about the work or to write about the work. It might be nice if authors and writers had an extra incentive. Perhaps an organization such as a Guild or the International Feldenkrais Federation could pay a small bounty for each published article? Or a group of people could come together and create a tiny non-profit or other organization to fund such a thing. Or would it be considered unethical to get paid to publish an article in someone else’s newspaper or periodical?

I don’t know. Just thinking outloud.

Stay Updated

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Do you have recordings of your ATM classes or workshops? Have you wondered about selling them online? Or you want to make recordings and reach a larger audience, even become an “international player”? Perhaps you simply want to diversify your practice and have more sources of income….?

I often get people asking me about how I sell my products online and if it is worth the time and effort. Like many things in life the answer depends on what you want and what you value. On a monthly basis, I get payments from over a dozen sources – not only from selling my downloads on iTunes, Amazon and Google Play, but also selling them on my websites and blogs, not to mention other sources of online income such as google ad revenue, affiliate fees for promoting products, coaching sessions, online conference and, yes webinars such as this one.

If you want to get an overview of how to sell your Feldenkrais products online and what the benefits could be for your particular situation, join me for this 55-minute webinar. I will not only give you a broad overview of how to sell online (and to do so easily and cheaply) but also give you the tools you need to do so.

Money, of course is a benefit of selling Feldenkrais mp3´s, CD and other products. But you can also sell online to get yourself better known, to help the method gain more traction and, sometimes, you may to give your Feldenkrais sessions away in exchange for people’s email addresses. Once you have email addresses you can follow-up with messages promoting your classes and workshops.

If you know what you are doing, you can…um…just do it.

Much of this “online stuff” is only complicated until you know what to do. Let me give you an overview so that you can take the next step in your professional and personal development!

As usual, I am not only going to teach you cool and useful stuff, but also give you some bonuses such as a video tutorial series that will show you exactly how to set-up and use a cheap, effective shopping cart system called, “E-Junkie.” I also have a special code that will give you a 67-day free trial. You can have your first sale before you have to pay.

One of the main things that I love about selling online, especially mp3´s of Feldenkrais ATM series is that everything is automated. People pay, get their products, and the money is deposited in my account automatically. And, no, you don’t need to be a programmer to set-it up.

I am keeping the cost of this webinar low. Join me for only $27.00. That is the lowest price that I have ever charged for a session! And, as always, you will have access to a recording of the webinar that you can download or play online. You don’t have to attend “live” (though I recommend that you do.)

Ready? Click the button below to reach my new webinar site, “Ryan’s Webinars.” After you enroll, you will be directed to a special page that has your webinar link. The same page where you can watch the recording of the webinar after I post it and ask any follow questions that you have.

Buy Eliminate Back Pain Now with Feldenkrais

Feldenkrais MP3 Download Package

Feldenkrais Podcast Episodes

Feldenkrais sessions that involve the breath have a tendency to bring out a great deal of emotion in me, sometimes leading to spontaneous crying or anger. Have you experienced something similar? The first time I experienced it was during a Feldenkrais table session (sometimes called "Functional Integration"). I was young at the time, only 24... […]

I am at a coffee shop preparing the transcript for my weekly Easy Feldenkrais session and I had a moment of confusion when the transcript of Moshe's session said, "Press the middle of your waist in the floor. That is, press the small ribs on the right and left - the floating ribs." To me,... […]

I was really excited a few days ago when I saw that my longtime friend, colleague and fellow "Feldenkrais Evangelist" Alfons Grabher had released a new book: Feldenkrais With Alfons: Getting Better Day By Day. Alfons does what I do - travels the world (He is an Austrian currently traveling in Hong Kong, Taiwan and... […]

Here is a wonderful (and free) audio Feldenkrais session that you can do right now. No need to enter your email, just click below to play. It is based on a session from "Alexander Yanai" (or AY as they are sometimes called). This is one of my all time favorite sessions. And that has little... […]

Several Feldenkrais practitioners told me that they do not like the tone of the article below from the U.K. Telegraph, but I love it! Slightly irreverent and 100% positive for Feldenkrais (from my point of view). "I was seeing the best physios in the world – and doing Pilates,” he recalls of his injuries, yet... […]

Moshe Feldenkrais

Every so often, I get questions from people about TMJ and surgery, be it a disk removal or grinding of the teeth or what have you. I am not a medical doctor and I cannot give medical advice. But what I can do is review the research on TMJ surgery, consult with experts, and make...

I have not been updating the blog too much these days, but just wanted to let you know that I (Ryan Nagy) am still here and the TMJ series is still going strong. I also want to relay to a very strange experience that I had last year but that I am only now writing...

I’m in the process of pulling together my pdf’s and research articles on TMJ in preparation for writing a book on the subject of “curing” TMJ. I put the word cure in quotes as very often TMJ does not seem to be a disease as much as a process. People often have processes of clenching...